Union Blues

In 1979, I went to work for the London Sunday Times. I had come from the New Statesman—small, fraternal, left-wing. The Sunday Times was large, internally competitive, and politically centrist. But since my job on the literary pages was the same—deputy in a department of two—I didn’t expect much to change. This was naïve. The Statesman had been liberal to the point of impracticality: it once appointed a messenger who turned out to be agoraphobic, and staff spent many head-shaking weeks wondering why the internal mail was efficiently delivered but the external stuff didn’t seem to be getting through. The Sunday Times, on the other hand, was soon to be bought by Rupert Murdoch.

For a short while, things were quiet. Then, one day, I was sitting at my desk, looking out of the window at our sister paper, the daily Times: a blockish modern building with departments layered on top of one another. I noticed that one of these layers seemed strangely deserted. The potted plants still lined the windowsills, but no activity was going on in their shade. One entire department—telemarketing or something—had been Murdoched. Over the next few weeks, the plants wilted until new appointees arrived and threw them out.

Before long, it was our turn. As a by-product of a labor dispute with the printers, everyone else at the paper—all fourteen hundred of us—was informed that we were suspended. News International no longer recognized our contracts of employment. The journalists inquired upward, and were told not to worry our little heads. You’ll be fine, they said, just carry on working as usual; in a while we’ll issue new contracts on the same terms as the old ones. Then why this sacking? What was the point? Well, it was just that management wanted to sort out some other layer of hapless plant-coddlers, and from a legal point of view it was convenient to fire everyone, while not necessarily meaning it.

This was my first direct experience of corporate management techniques. And the one thing everyone on the paper knew was that Murdoch regarded journalists as expendable; indeed, more or less interchangeable. If one didn’t like the job, another would. It was a chilly moment. Around this time, I heard a News International manager—testosterone in a suit—utter a phrase I have never forgotten. He was being asked about some especially brutal piece of “management”; how could the company possibly do—i.e., get away with—something like that? “You do it by doing it,” he replied. Quite.

The National Union of Journalists called a meeting of the chapel, as a union branch is known in this trade. I went along, expecting—well, the sort of movie scene in which craggy journos denounce wicked new bosses on grounds of highish principle. The main motion proposed sending a letter to Rupert Murdoch protesting at our mass suspension, which was a direct breach of the disputes procedure he had signed up to when he bought the paper. This reasonable stance began to crumble when someone pointed out that Murdoch was a pretty tough customer and might not like getting a letter of protest—especially one that demanded a reply by a certain date. Then someone else ingeniously proposed that we write a letter that didn’t require an answer from Murdoch: this way, we wouldn’t have to find out if our bat squeak of protest had offended the great man. This suggestion was seriously discussed for a while, and even formulated into these menacing words: “The N.U.J. Chapel would like to remind Mr. Murdoch and News International that it is aware of its position.” That seemed to cover it. Or were we, even so, being too bold? On further reflection, we saw the folly of such provocation, and instead resolved to do absolutely nothing for the time being. A while later, we were all reinstated, and everything carried on as before, except for an awareness of the fundamental contempt in which we, as employees, were held.

Eight or nine years passed, and long after I had left the paper I was appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival. After my event, a middle-aged blond woman of an international svelteness not typical of such locations asked me to sign a book for her husband. I raised my obliging pen over the title page. “His name’s Rupert Murdoch.” “But he once sacked me.” “Oh, I’m sure it was nothing personal,” came the mollifying reply. True: it hadn’t been. And in that moment—politeness mixing perhaps with the brief vanity of imagining that a novel might strike to the heart of a monster—my pen blabbed, “To Rupert Murdoch from Julian Barnes.” It is the phrase I most regret having written. ♦

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